Trivia

As part of the preview for the Gehenna expansion on April 1st, 2004 White Wolf showed the card “Pox Fly” on its website.

Initially there was some irritation about the power of the card. But it was, of course, an April’s Fool joke by White Wolf corrected a few days later with an explanation. The card text was pure imagination and the artwork was later seen on Recalled to the Founder.

The card was then shown without the markings (as seen on picture on the right), but a very observant reader could spot the date “4/01” and the word “April” beforehand.

The first three trading games developed by Richard Garfield and produced by Wizards of the Coast were Magic: the Gathering (1993), Vampire: the Eternal Struggle (1994) and Netrunner (1996). All of these were branded as part of the so-called “Deckmaster” series. But in fact, had little in common other than being trading card games and using the tapping cards (rotating cards by 90 degrees to indicate that they’re being used). The brand name was actually never really used/marketed ever, since the buyers and players never really cared if a particular game was part of the series, but since the cardbacks had been printed in that fashion in the first editions, Wizard decided not to change them anymore. (Actually they did when the name of VtES changed from Jyhad to Vampire the Eternal Struggle (in 1995), but they didn’t change the Deckmaster label).

Due the belonging to the “Deckmaster” series, the cards of the series had (approx.) the same dimensions. A deckmaster card ..

The VtES Player’s Kit (product code: WW2257 / ISBN 1-58846-899-2) was an introductory set for VtES beginners, and was released at the same time as the Third Edition expansion in 2006. It contained basically the material needed for 4 players to start with VtES and was sold for $24.99 (list price). The player’s kit contained a number of different items:

Four 50-card introductory decks.

A large turn-by-turn instruction.

120 blood tokens (red glass).

A Rulebook.

The four decks are actually halved versions of the Third Edition starter decks. Each of them had 44 library cards and 6 crypt cards. The decks were pre-stacked for use with the turn-by-turn instruction to guide new players through the game.

In addition, in each of these four decks there was one crypt cards, which did not show a colored (finalized) version of a vampire, but “only” the artist sketch. One left right you can see the four “unique” crypt cards from the VtES Players Kit. All the cards from the VtES Player’s Kit are tournament legal (including the four special crypt card versions) and function in the same way as the “original” cards from the Third Edition.

As discussed on VEKN.net, a number of abnominations/vampires/werewolves have been printed both in VtES and in Rage (the card game based on Werewolf: The Apocalypse roleplaying game), which are Allonzo Montoya, Count Vladmir Rustovich,Samuel Haight, and Walks-With-Might.

Back in ’94 when Wizards of the Coast and Richard Garfield were designing the original Jyhad right (after they had published Magic the Gathering (MtG) a year earlier), the word Sengir got somehow transferred from MtG to VtES.

In the first MtG edition (“Alpha“) the card “Sengir Vampire” is a black creature card with 4/4 and flying which gets a +1/+1 counter each time the Sengir Vampire is damaging another creature and moving it into the graveyard. The card has been reprinted multiple times, with M2012 being the last expansion where Sengir Vampire was included.

So what’s all this fuss about Sengir vampires, what are they exactly. Well, they don’t actually fit in the whole World of Darkness of White Wolf. The background story is completly separate.

Sengir is the name of vampire race in the MtG multiverse (allegedly similar to the similar to the Nosferatu breed). Sengir Vampires are said to be descendants of the legendary Baron Sengir on the planes of Dominaria and Ulgrotha.

Apparently the infamous Baron Sengir is the founder of this particular breed of vampires, as described in the book Secrets of Magic. He’s ruling his the Dark Barony on Ulgrotha from Castle Sengir. A whole more information on Baron Sengir can be found in the MtG Salavation Wiki.

Currently there have been nine cards published with the name “Sengir” in its title, namely:

The Nights of Reckoning expansion contained so-called rules cards. Each NoR booster also contained one rules cards (from a set of five rules cards) describing the new rules for the set. For added use in draft or sealed play, each rules card also doubled as a library card as indicated on the card when turned upside down.

Initially these cards were not allowed as part of decks in constructed tournaments. But after some discussion in the VtES Usenet Newsgroup, a month after the initial release of Nights of Reckoning (on May 10th, 2006), the rules cards became legal for all V:EKN tournaments, both constructed and limited.